11/9/2022 0 Comments Belkin f5u409 windows 8.1 driver![]() ![]() (an Open Source driver was later released for it here) The same problem persisted through later models – for example the Belkin F5U409 had Windows Vista 32 bit drivers – but Belkin never released 64 bit drivers. Belkin didn’t even release a MacOSX driver for that device, only OS9 drivers. For example the F5U103 got 32 bit Windows XP drivers only, and these drivers were buggy – there was an incompatibility specifically with that device and the VIA SouthBridge VT82C686A PCI chipset. For example the Belkin F5U103 had a complete set of lights to indicate the status of the serial port lines – and all of the handshaking lines in the port worked! Unfortunately, USB driver support was terrible with these devices. When systems started shipping without serial ports some of the early USB-to-Serial adapters released for Windows 98 had quite nice hardware. That’s got to be in the running for the understatement of the year in PC hardware! “Devices that convert between USB and RS-232 do not work with all software or on all personal computers” The Wikipedia article on RS232 Serial has this to say about the USB to Serial dongles: As a result, in the first decade 2000-2010, USB-to-Serial port adapter manufacturers had to write their own USB serial stack and drivers. As late as Windows 10 Microsoft was still fixing bugs in usbser.sys although it has been reported here that it’s _finally_ fixed. ![]() Unfortunately, however, Microsoft supplied a very buggy generic USB-to-serial driver (USBSER.SYS) with Windows 2000 and later versions of Windows. Bug kb918365 is a typical usbser.sys bug. Buyers would plug the devices into their PC via USB, then load a manufacturer-supplied USB-to-serial driver and then communicate to the device using the same software that they had always used in the past. But, what ended up happening with a large variety of industrial devices (like multimeters – a discussion of that is here) is that the manufacturers simply moved the serial port inside of the device and added a USB-to-serial chip, then put a USB port on the device. To a large extent that did happen with printers and mice and other consumer peripherals. But the serial port requirement for PCs was dropped by Microsoft and Intel in the PC System Design Guide PC-99, available here with the statement: “USB is expected to replace legacy serial” in chapter 13, along with a directive making serial ports optional. RS232 is an old serial port standard that is pretty well documented on it’s Wikipedia article here. At one time, all PC’s shipped with RS232 serial ports. Now I’m going to be writing about another PC device that has a niche area use – the RS232 serial port – and using this to talk about and illustrate something that isn’t often covered in computer articles for the general public – the issue of chip counterfeiting. I’ve written before about use of modems under Windows 7 & 8. Modems are definitely old-school but still have niche area uses. ![]()
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